3 ms·

Make a great product, gain a user. Have great support, earn a fan

49 points by a4agarwal 16y ago

Lewisham 16y ago
Couldn't agree more. Posterous has great support, Rapportive has great support, I even had a useful, enjoyable live chat with Hipmunk last night. I'd like to see startups have a full-time technically-literate support person in the team by default. Have them sit in on meetings and such, but no time on code, only customers. The return policy for Costco costs them next to nothing in the grand scheme of things. The loyalty they engender because of it, and the two or three extra customers they generate from each of those fans, is worth so much more. It's a great lesson for business large and small.
- unohoo 16y ago
  >> I'd like to see startups have a full-time technically-literate support person in the team by default. Have them sit in on meetings and such, but no time on code, only customers. +1 for that. Although I think having a full time support person might not be feasible for small startups, overall, I feel that customer support is grossly undervalued. Developers see tech support as beneath them. while management teams tend to view support as a cost overhead. Not only can great customer service lead to a extremely satisfied customer, it also helps close the feedback loop from actual customers back to development / product features. and i say this based on my brief experience working in tech support.
  - drewbuschhorn 16y ago
    Have you actually experienced that 'Developers see tech support as beneath them'? In the interactions I've had with both computer and science start-ups ( admittedly a small sample set, 3 companies ), I never actually seen this, though maybe I've just lucked out. By and large the fellow devs or engineers did either take care of it or make sure someone was taking care of it as soon as an issue came in. It's not about altruism, it's just that's the best way to convince people to part with their money. As a 'support manager' / back-end coder myself now, I try to follow their example. Got to agree with you that having a dedicated support person might be nice, but I can't imagine it becoming common ... first for the reason you mention, but also the types of people attracted to the instability of start-ups usually wouldn't respond well to 'oh no, John, don't muck about with the code/schematics, we want you to be customer focused'.
RobIsIT 16y ago
I don't think it's about support. I think it's about respect and honesty. The collective mentality at many companies (web or not) relays things such as "oh, they're just users" or "well, that's too bad it didn't work out". It's easy to default into the general presumption that great support will solve problems like these. However, the underlying issue isn't support, it's respect. It comes from the top and is echoed throughout the company right down to the customer. Sometimes support issues can't be solved and when they can't, respect defines the interaction. Even when problems can be solved, if a user / customer / co-worker is treated with respect, they typically feel valued and satisfied when they are treated with true respect.
storborg 16y ago
Actually, I think this sort of infrastructure software may be the one area where it's more important to have good pricing than good support, precisely because the usage scales so large. For example, take credit card processors: if a $50mil/year company has a choice between a payment gateway that charges 1.9% and one that charges 2.1%, they'll put up with a LOT of poor documentation, bad API design, and bad support to use the 1.9% company instead--that price savings is $100k a year, enough to hire a great engineer to deal with the bullshit. Similarly, if you have a choice between an infrastructure company that charges you $300k a year vs. one that's $100k a year, a $200k different buys you a lot of "in house support". When things scale big, pricing really matters.
StavrosK 16y ago
The odd thing about this is that I don't really think it's that bad to offer good support. On my startup (historious) I see almost every user who's emailing us be really surprised when we respond within a minute or so. We're always at the computer and reading someone's email doesn't take that long, or break your concentration very much. I know it's different for large companies, but they have the kind of money to hire good support staff. At those scales, though, you lose something that's even more impressive: The ability to fix small bugs by the time you've replied to a user. If someone reports a bug to us, we usually have it fixed and pushed in one or two minutes, so when the user gets a response saying "thank you for the feedback, we've fixed the bug, you can try again" within a minute of reporting, they become really loyal to the service...
daychilde 16y ago
>earn a fan Live in South Korea, die of fan death? But on topic: I think the thing that infuriates me the most is when a support person clearly doesn't read what I write to them. I can't count the number of times I've had to reply and say, "Listen, I know you have canned text to make your job go quicker, because most people haven't researched their own problem before coming to you, but if you'd read what I actually wrote, you'd realize why your response was completely unhelpful." That's usually followed up by another batch of canned text. ARGH.
melissamiranda 16y ago
Support makes such a difference. I just got locked out from my PayPal account and there's no way to get it back without talking to someone on Monday (that's 48 hours away). Seriously, it's a huge company and they can't run a call center on the weekends. I'm going to cancel my account and use the WePay guys instead.
- melissamiranda 16y ago
  It's no wonder that you hear "I HATE PayPal" from half the people who hear the company's name. Here's a company with an arguably good product that's going up in flames because of their terrible support.

49 points by a4agarwal 16y ago

Couldn't agree more. Posterous has great support, Rapportive has great support, I even had a useful, enjoyable live chat with Hipmunk last night. I'd like to see startups have a full-time technically-literate support person in the team by default. Have them sit in on meetings and such, but no time on code, only customers. The return policy for Costco costs them next to nothing in the grand scheme of things. The loyalty they engender because of it, and the two or three extra customers they generate from each of those fans, is worth so much more. It's a great lesson for business large and small.

unohoo 16y ago
>> I'd like to see startups have a full-time technically-literate support person in the team by default. Have them sit in on meetings and such, but no time on code, only customers. +1 for that. Although I think having a full time support person might not be feasible for small startups, overall, I feel that customer support is grossly undervalued. Developers see tech support as beneath them. while management teams tend to view support as a cost overhead. Not only can great customer service lead to a extremely satisfied customer, it also helps close the feedback loop from actual customers back to development / product features. and i say this based on my brief experience working in tech support.
- drewbuschhorn 16y ago
  Have you actually experienced that 'Developers see tech support as beneath them'? In the interactions I've had with both computer and science start-ups ( admittedly a small sample set, 3 companies ), I never actually seen this, though maybe I've just lucked out. By and large the fellow devs or engineers did either take care of it or make sure someone was taking care of it as soon as an issue came in. It's not about altruism, it's just that's the best way to convince people to part with their money. As a 'support manager' / back-end coder myself now, I try to follow their example. Got to agree with you that having a dedicated support person might be nice, but I can't imagine it becoming common ... first for the reason you mention, but also the types of people attracted to the instability of start-ups usually wouldn't respond well to 'oh no, John, don't muck about with the code/schematics, we want you to be customer focused'.

RobIsIT 16y ago

I don't think it's about support. I think it's about respect and honesty. The collective mentality at many companies (web or not) relays things such as "oh, they're just users" or "well, that's too bad it didn't work out". It's easy to default into the general presumption that great support will solve problems like these. However, the underlying issue isn't support, it's respect. It comes from the top and is echoed throughout the company right down to the customer. Sometimes support issues can't be solved and when they can't, respect defines the interaction. Even when problems can be solved, if a user / customer / co-worker is treated with respect, they typically feel valued and satisfied when they are treated with true respect.

storborg 16y ago

Actually, I think this sort of infrastructure software may be the one area where it's more important to have good pricing than good support, precisely because the usage scales so large. For example, take credit card processors: if a $50mil/year company has a choice between a payment gateway that charges 1.9% and one that charges 2.1%, they'll put up with a LOT of poor documentation, bad API design, and bad support to use the 1.9% company instead--that price savings is $100k a year, enough to hire a great engineer to deal with the bullshit. Similarly, if you have a choice between an infrastructure company that charges you $300k a year vs. one that's $100k a year, a $200k different buys you a lot of "in house support". When things scale big, pricing really matters.

StavrosK 16y ago

The odd thing about this is that I don't really think it's that bad to offer good support. On my startup (historious) I see almost every user who's emailing us be really surprised when we respond within a minute or so. We're always at the computer and reading someone's email doesn't take that long, or break your concentration very much. I know it's different for large companies, but they have the kind of money to hire good support staff. At those scales, though, you lose something that's even more impressive: The ability to fix small bugs by the time you've replied to a user. If someone reports a bug to us, we usually have it fixed and pushed in one or two minutes, so when the user gets a response saying "thank you for the feedback, we've fixed the bug, you can try again" within a minute of reporting, they become really loyal to the service...

daychilde 16y ago

>earn a fan Live in South Korea, die of fan death? But on topic: I think the thing that infuriates me the most is when a support person clearly doesn't read what I write to them. I can't count the number of times I've had to reply and say, "Listen, I know you have canned text to make your job go quicker, because most people haven't researched their own problem before coming to you, but if you'd read what I actually wrote, you'd realize why your response was completely unhelpful." That's usually followed up by another batch of canned text. ARGH.

melissamiranda 16y ago

Support makes such a difference. I just got locked out from my PayPal account and there's no way to get it back without talking to someone on Monday (that's 48 hours away). Seriously, it's a huge company and they can't run a call center on the weekends. I'm going to cancel my account and use the WePay guys instead.

melissamiranda 16y ago
It's no wonder that you hear "I HATE PayPal" from half the people who hear the company's name. Here's a company with an arguably good product that's going up in flames because of their terrible support.